New Trailer For Omen Sequel Series Damien Starring Merlin’s Bradley James

Showrunner Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead, The Shield) has been speaking to journalists about his new A&E series Damien, a sequel to the Omen (1976), apparently ignoring the events of subsequent films (good move). This comes as A&E reveals a new trailer for the show, which stars Merlin’s Bradley James.

“I really wanted to look at something where someone is supposedly tasked with this horrifying future crime that he’s going to bring about the apocalypse,” explained Mazzara today at Television Critics Association (TCA) press conference.

Damien was originally greenlit as a six-episode series at Lifetime, before moving to sister channel A&E picking up an extra four episodes along the way. It picks up 25 years after the 1976 feature film The Omen ended with the five-year-old Antichrist having killed virtually everyone else with a speaking role in the film. Now 30, Damien is haunted by his past and must come to terms with his true nature: that he’s the Antichrist. The series will see the character pulled in both directions as he tries to save both the world and himself.

As for the missing 25 years of Damien’s life, Mazzara reveals that plans are underway to develop a story that fills in those gaps for mobile devices. “We do know what happened to him and where he’s been. This is a character that has a complete life story and we’re jumping in at this point. The first episode, he’s 30 and Christ was baptised when he was 30.”

Damien is debuting on US TV alongside an alternative look as the devil in Fox’s Lucifer(trailer here), a comedy about the devil owning a nightclub very loosely based on the character created by Neil Gaiman in The Sandman.

“The devil has always been very sexy,” says Mazzara. “There’s something in the air that people feel like these are the end times, in some way. There’s an anxiety about what’s happening all around the world and some of these shows — like Lucifer may take a comic approach — we’re taking a hopefully more thoughtful, thematic approach to that material. There has been a lot of post-apocalyptic shows out there now and we’re the show that’s about the question: ‘Can you stop it?’”